Anzacs being removed from history!

Quite right James. No need to read the book if you've got someone to tell you what you think about it.

Myth busters discredited by the very people who perpetuate the myths? Well they would say that, wouldn't they?

Thesis - antithesis - synthesis increases knowledge. Thesis - ignore antithesis does not.

The point is that whether or not the supposed "myths" are false on an individual basis doesn't prove an awful lot. There are exceptions to various rules that have been put in place, but the overall point remains the same - the war was terrible, it shouldn't have happened, the loss of life was totally senseless and in no way justifiable, and every country involved was culpable

History-writing today is about ideas, not about the actual events themselves. It's why military history, in terms of working out what happened in battles and so on, is largely irrelevant in academic fields now, and the history of the royal family and government is heading the same way to an extent - the focus today is on language, discourse and experience, particularly of the bulk of the population or minorities within it rather than elites

The current dominant view of the English Reformation, for example, is that what Henry VIII officially changed in London was fairly irrelevant to the majority of the English population, who essentially remained Catholics all through his and Edward VI's reign despite attempts to impose Protestantism on them. This view has only developed fairly recently because previously historians just focused on government policy and assumed that it made some kind of difference to the population - historians didn't actually go out and look at what people were experiencing elsewhere

Niall Ferguson isn't the only historian whose work is heavily influenced by his own political ideology - we all are, to an extent, and it happens on all sides of the political spectrum. But not all historians are heavily influenced by such a dangerous, divisive ideology as his. There's a difference between being contrarian or revisionist and making deliberate moves to try and airbrush out all the bad things a country has done in order to promote a conservative, nationalist, neoliberal, elitist, pro-militarist/interventionist ideology

The idea that WWI soldiers wanted to go and fight as propagated by Ferguson and co shouldn't matter - they were enthusiastic because they had been led to be by government propaganda, in the same way that people today think there's too much immigration and foreigners should go back where they came from because they are led to think this by the government and the media. There's no point saying "people believed X" if you're not going to critically engage with why they believed that. But for Ferguson to do this would destroy his "poor old British elites did nothing wrong" narrative, so he falls back on the whole "well, the poor people wanted it" routine. That's just flatly ignoring the discourses of the time

There has always been progression and revision in history, particularly with WWI - this isn't some cause that has been invented and carried by Ferguson, Sheffield and co as if they are noble warriors fighting against the majority. If anything, far from the "progress" they'd have you believe this is, they're trying to take this back to a more traditional view - writing the elites back into it as figures we should sympathise with. Haig hasn't always been a figure of hate - in the immediate post-war era he was considered a hero, and it was only in the 1960s that this view was revised into what Michael Gove calls the "Blackadder history" view - ironically a view in part created by Alan Clark, a Tory MP. The recent surge in sympathetic portrayals of Haig is just a "rediscovery" of the traditional view and isn't what I would term "progressive". And there's a reason that view had died out

It's no coincidence that Ferguson supported the Iraq War around the same time he was writing and talking about how World War I wasn't that bad. He's not doing this for the sake of historical revisionism on its own merit - this has a purpose. This is a man who is now at the forefront of the new history curriculum which has been widely condemned as regressive and damaging to British history because the message behind it echoes that of his own work - that Britain is all sweetness and light, the empire was a right old laugh, and all the bad things the British did abroad and in the wars were just minor slip-ups that shouldn't matter. And funnily enough, breeding a new generation of British nationalists will just create more support for the Tory Party - funny how that works out like that...

Since history began to be critiqued by postmodern philosophers in the last 40-50 years, historians have had to move away from talking about "facts" because what a "fact" is has become a matter for considerable debate. Postmodern critics have pointed out that the Historical Method is based on examining all the evidence and come to an unbiased conclusion, and yet we all know it is totally impractical to analyse all the evidence, and all of us come to a subject with preconceptions so it's impossible to be unbiased. Therefore, being objective as a historian is essentially impossible

History has had to reinvent itself. This is why the emphasis has shifted away from "proving" things to theory, ideas, experience etc. And everything has to be of wider relevance

An example would be JFK's assassination. You can't write a history paper examining what happened - it doesn't really add anything to the field. You can't even write a paper examining why it happened. Instead, an appropriate topic for research would be, say, the history of conspiracy theories and why they become so popular in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, or how the American public responded to his assassination and what that represents about wider thoughts about public figures, major events or the Cold War

Hmmm. There is a difference between not focusing purely on "facts" and aiming to ignore or even worse to discredit "facts" that are unhelpful to a prejudiced position.

I was genuinely surprised to read in the Dan Snow piece the statistic that the WW1 death toll amongst old Etonians was far higher than amongst "ordinary" soldiers. It slapped the prejudice that I had grown up with in the face. I had always thought that the posh boys had it easy while the rough boys bore the brunt. Was I wrong? How do I adjust my views to take that statistic into account? I know. I'll see what young James makes of it- he's a proper historian.

The answer is that young James refuses to even consider whether the statistic is accurate or what it means. He can dismiss it entirely as it does not draw the narrative in the desired direction. If it doesn't fit the prejudice, stick your fingers in your ears. You can claim that is the modern way to do history if you like. To me it is bollocks.

I suppose it is the same as most of the football "debate" on the internet. Take a very opinionated stance, twist facts to support your view, ignore any reasoned debate and keep flogging the same hobby horse. Grumpy old men find such things a little tiresome.

I long for the days of intellectual rigour in historical debate :

Snow just quotes the statistic. He doesn't try to explain why that might have been the case - he just quotes it and leaves it there. To try to draw any major conclusions from one statistic without critically engaging with the context of it adds (and debunks) nothing

Also I'd like to see where this idea that "the upper class got off lightly" came from to begin with. He hasn't explained that either. There's no point just planting a statement there if you're not going to give the background of why people believe it and where the ideas came from. You'd not even get away with that at A Level - considering he got a first at Oxford, you'd expect him to realise that

This is the problem through the article as a whole. It's set out to be deliberately provocative and antagonistic without any depth of analysis. And the reason for that is any degree of analysis would expose the fact that he's twisting the facts to suit his agenda

I know it is equally politically loaded but Lindsey German has gone through the article point-by-point and deconstructed it: noglory.org/index.php/articles/112-lions-and-donkeys-dan-snow-s-10-myths-about-world-war-one-answered-by-no-glory#.Uuj11flFB1s

And there's also this article about how Snow's great-grandfather general would have disagreed with the airbrushing as well:

noglory.org/index.php/articles/115-what-bbc-historian-dan-snow-didn-t-learn-from-his-great-grandfather-about-the-first-world-war#.Uuj12flFB1s

Oh feck! What did I start! Sorry!